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“... Willa Cather is one of those American writers whose fictional accomplishments were both applauded and judged harshly when she was alive. Now, forty years after her death, they are the subject of increasing critical interest. In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ended on the level of a Ladies Home Journal serial ...”

“... In her work​ Willa Cather celebrated heroism; in her life she collected honorary degrees, told her publishers which typeface to use, and stayed out of politics. When Sinclair Lewis won the first American Nobel Prize he said she should have got it instead. She was read by H.L. Mencken with ‘increasing joy ...”

“... by looking she’s One Tragic Babe. What to do? (Gasp, splutter, cough cough!) It is clear what Willa Cather – lifelong connoisseur of big-bosomed tragédiennes – would have done: snatch up La Duse and let gabbly old Bernhardt go to hell. In her new book on the novelist, Joan Acocella speaks with some reverence of Cath-er’s ‘Duse ...”

“... was how Ernest Hemingway described the portrayal of the Great War in One of Ours by Willa Cather. Despite lifting scenes from the movie Birth of a Nation, it made Cather rich and won her the Pulitzer Prize. H.L. Mencken was as dismissive as Hemingway, finding in it a ‘lyrical nonsensicality’ that ...”

“... Halfway​ through Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), the heroine, a young singer called Thea Kronborg, travels to the Southwest and takes for herself a little rock room among the cliff dwellings. She is accompanied by her soon-to-be-lover Fred Ottenburg – wealthy and secretly married – but the purpose of the pilgrimage is to be alone, to think and to strengthen her voice:Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and incomplete conceptions in her mind – almost in her hands ...”

“... the day, the sun detonated her gilded surface and she ‘flashed against a green-blue sky’, as Willa Cather described it in My Mortal Enemy.She was no girl but a thirteen-foot-high goddess: Diana, the hunter, holding a bow and arrow, the string tautly drawn. The figure was commissioned by the architect Stanford White for his redesigned Madison Square ...”

“... do to sleep is open A book; but the wet dream is new, as if The pressure of De Bello Gallico And Willa Cather face down on his fly, Spread wide, one clasping the other from behind, Had added confusion to confusion, like looking For your glasses with your glasses on, A mystically clear, unknowing trance of being ... And then you feel them – like ...”

“... feminism of The Playbook, which alights on incisive stage commentary by women, not least Willa Cather, who reviewed for the Nebraska State Journal and described the theatre delivering human experience ‘not only by voice and attitude, but by all those unnamed ways in which an animal of any species makes known its terror or misery to other ...”

“... only as the name of a lethal cocktail, is the title of a frail and delicate masterpiece by Willa Cather, that much underrated writer, which more than fifty years ago delineated the shape that North American civilisation would assume in the mind if its metropolis were taken to be, not New York or Boston, Philadelphia or Washington, San Francisco or ...”

“... are relatives, fellow students and Linson’s artist friends in New York, literary figures like Willa Cather and H.G. Wells, and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific ...”

“... commitment is clearest in her later work – a parallel might be drawn here with the work of Willa Cather. Again, much has been out of print. None of the books which mark her maturity and homecoming has been re-issued except for the autobiographical gem Childhood at Brindabella. An early version of Up the Country and a whodunnit, Bring the ...”

“... wild land’. By ‘wild’, I think is meant openness, expansiveness, that sense of land, as Willa Cather wrote, which is ‘nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made’. But does this ‘material’ exist any longer? Is there any ‘wild land’ in this congested country, if it’s on the scale of ...”

“... first through anorexia, and then through cross-dressing and gender conflicts that remind us of Willa Cather or Carson McCullers. At 12 she had her picture taken wearing her father’s suit and hat; in high school, a friend noted, the lanky Jean ‘looked like a boy with a dress on’. In her unpublished novel In the Snowfall, the autobiographical ...”

“... the Indiana woods: ‘Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Cather and Hypatia and Patsy Cline.’ An old chemistry textbook now features a liturgical calendar, its red-letter days including ‘the Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited ...”

“... Ross’s hayseed ways have now passed into legend. ‘Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?’, ‘Willa Cather – did he write The Private Life of Helen of Troy?’ Ross, it was said, hardly ever read novels and was suspicious of poetry that aspired beyond light verse. He called music and painting the ‘two phoney arts’. He was contemptuous of all ...”